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It is an honour to be with you this morning. The award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade is special. It is special because until recently my readers were drawn from the confines of the world of law, and because Frankfurt is significant for our family. Andre Schiffrin was a renowned publisher. He came every year to the Book Fair, and three of his authors – Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, and George F. Kennan – were honoured with this Prize. His daughter Natalia is my wife, first reader, and most acute and constant critic.
And it special because the subject of peace is at the heart of themes that permeate my work, and which I address this morning: the burden and dangers of silence, the confrontation of wrongs, the rights of individuals and groups, and the indispensability of the rule of law.
These themes coalesce around the idea – revolutionary in 1945, contested still – that state power is limited by the rights of individuals and groups, under national and international laws. This idea transcends law and literature and touches each of us.
Such themes emerged for me only later in life. My childhood was happy, I was loved and had all a child could wish for. Yet I grew up in a world of silences, matters of which my brother and I were only vaguely aware.
This was a family silence, of the past. Only later did I learn the details. The psychoanalysts Mária Török and Nicolas Abraham captured the effect in words that introduce my book East West Street:
“What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.”
The secrets of our others were murderous events of which you need no reminder. Ours was a German silence, borne out of horrors that befell my grandparents and mother. The consequence was: nothing German in the house. No dishwasher or music, no car, no books, no nothing. Well, not quite nothing: somehow, German – well Austrian – nourishment squeezed past the trap doors. I remain very partial to schnitzel and strudel.
Over the years things changed for me. At university I met the German lector – actually an Austrian – a lovely man, not a monster, we became friends. As a lecturer, my students included impressive young Germans. Nothing monstrous about them either. We talked of the past, in good, open ways.
Several of my dear German friends are in the audience today. A filmmaker. A museum director. A lawyer born in the East. And the son of a lawyer who was convicted and hanged at Nuremberg for the murder of four million human beings, including eighty members of my family. Niklas Frank has discarded silence, engaging with his father’s crimes, his family history, his country’s history. He is my friend. His presence today says more than any words could.
My work as an academic and a barrister – we wear the wigs – valued independence and integrity, and the fair assessment of facts, wherever they may lead. A barrister cannot easily be tribal: you act for some you like or don’t, whose values you share or abhor. And you are not criticised for acting against your own country or any group to which you might belong. Yet to be a barrister and academic doesn’t mean I have no views. I do, and will return to them.
One thing led to another. An independent spirit allowed things German to become a part of my life. A dishwasher here, a car there, a footballer – which nine-year old Londoner could forget Gerd Müller’s winning goal against England in the 1970 World Cup? – then music, German expressionist art and books.
Some writings have influenced me greatly, like Sebastian Haffner’s Geschichte eines Deutschen – I recently wrote the foreword to an English re-issue. A trainee judge at the Berlin Kammergericht, in March 1933, he witnessed the collapse of his country’s guardrails, an instant end to constitutionalism, legality and a cohort of referendars, destroyed by nationalistic and personal ambitions, corruption, and a cult of personality. As the Prussian justice system caved, so did the rights of individuals and groups. The rule of law tradition ‘disappeared overnight’.
Does this sound familiar? I express my respect for the lawyers and judges in the United States and elsewhere who stand firm and independent in the face of the assaults.
Haffner reminds us of what we are capable of, and how easy it can be. There is no better account. Chapter 30 of Geschichte eines Deutschen should be required reading in every school.
The years passed. I wrote academic tomes and argued cases before international courts, on the environment, boundaries, wars, international crimes.
Then an invitation came from Lviv, to deliver a lecture on my cases on international crimes. Lviv was Lemberg, where Leon Buchholz was born, in 1904, in the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1914, he fled to Vienna, as the Russians invaded. In 1938, he was stripped of his nationality and expelled. He became my Parisian, French grandfather. I went to Lviv not so much to give a lecture but to find the house of his birth. This was about memory and identity, to learn who he was, to learn who I am.
In preparation, my mother passed on two bags filled with the haunting secrets of others. I was fifty. I had never seen the birth certificates, swastika embossed passports, deportation orders, and other documents that filled the gaps of our family history.
I found Leon’s house. I gave a lecture on the origins of crimes against humanity and genocide, the fruits of National Socialism, it might be said. Almost unbelievably, it turned out that the origins of these concepts were in Lviv, and two men who studied there.
Despite the horrors that followed, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin did not curl up in a corner and weep. They produced ideas and books – Lauterpacht on crimes against humanity and the individual, Lemkin on genocide and the group. At Nuremberg, their ideas became international law, as I told in East West Street. Last month I was back in Lviv, as the mayor unveiled a memorial plaque at the building where the two men first studied criminal law. Today it is the people of Ukraine who are defending the Nuremberg principles. They need our support and our solidarity, and they should have it. Their struggle is our struggle.
Lviv gave me a writer’s voice, one that touches on the individual and the group, matters of identity, memory and silence. There is nothing original here. Laurent Naouri sang the Erbarme Dich from the Matthäus-Passion. The aria is a plea for mercy. It follows Peter’s denial of the truth – “Ich kenne des Menschen nicht” – and his moral collapse at seeing what he has done – “[Er] weinete bitterlich”.
The Passion connects two characters in East West Street.
Today it is the people of Ukraine who are defending the Nuremberg principles. They need our support and our solidarity, and they should have it. Their struggle is our struggle
In Cambridge, England, Hersch Lauterpacht struggled as he wrote the closing arguments for Nuremberg. “I am comforted by the ‘moving strains’ of the Matthäus Passion”, he told his son Eli, who later became my teacher.
At the same time, in a Nuremberg cell, Frank told a visitor that what helped him get through the trial was “to imagine I am listening to the Matthäus Passion.”
How extraordinary: a defendant and his prosecutor, on opposite sides of the courtroom, finding solace in a shared musical space. Lauterpacht understood Bach’s work, Frank didn’t. It reflects a Pietist belief that downplays the role of the Priest-celebrant and the group, emphasizing the primacy of the individual.
This idea mirrored Lauterpacht and Lemkin’s different approaches to the law – the individual or the group? The distinction persists today. It informs conflicts and the quest to which this Prize is dedicated. Peace.
Peace requires justice. Justice requires rules. Rules require law. And laws apply universally, not selectively. This is what the rule of law means.
Yet the law doesn’t operate in a vacuum. This I have learned. Writers and literature have a role, taking us to places where lawyers and judges do not tread. As Haffner noted, when legality disappeared so did the ‘world of books and discussion groups’.
This is a subject of my recent book, 38 Londres Street, on the Pinochet era. For three decades the Chilean courts failed to address the crimes, so the writers broke the silence. Pablo Neruda predicted, then Bruce Chatwin, Pedro Lemebel and Roberto Bolaño narrated.
Peace requires justice. Justice requires rules. Rules require law. And laws apply universally, not selectively. This is what the rule of law means
So it is again, as nationalisms and populisms beget racisms and anti-semitism and islamophobia and more. Boundaries are violated, civilians targeted, crimes perpetrated, forces, impunities unleashed.
Nature too is under assault, as this summer’s climate emergency confirmed. Next April, I will publish The Fifth Crime, a plea to add another international crime to the four that protect we humans. Those who destroy nature should also face international justice. Inspired by writers like Rachel Carson and Christopher Stone, the crime is called ecocide.
And as though our addiction to fossil fuels and the destruction of the nature that sustains us is not enough, we decide to develop a new addiction: to technologies and artificial intelligences that threaten to destroy us.
You could not invent the human condition, caught between decency and destruction. How to explain it? Read the opening of Eric Vuillard’s novel The Order of the Day – a gathering of top industrialists make their peace with Herr Hitler – and then observe the assemblage of top technology moguls at the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States, making a peace of their own.
Ambition, greed, narcissism, fragile male egos. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Round and round we go.
What is to be done?
Every community has rules, the international community is no different. It’s called international law, and it’s been around for centuries. Most of the rules work well. They are not about to disappear, even if some are gravely violated.
This is the time to stand up for them, not be silent; a time to face the facts, to uphold our principles, to build on them. It is a time to resist, not despair, for the rule of law is a long game. That is the lesson of Lauterpacht and Lemkin. When the grasp of the enemy is at your throat – as Spencer Tracy declared in the film Judgment at Nuremberg – that is when you defend your principles.
And those principles include the language of law.
A few years ago, I argued a phase of the case brought to The Hague by The Gambia, accusing Myanmar of genocidal acts against the Rohingya community. I didn’t like much that my opponent, a Nobel Laureate, said in court that day, but one line was memorable: “International law may well be our only global value system”, Aung San Suu Kyi told the judges.
She was right. I am not starry eyed, international law is not perfect, or fully effective, or immune to expressions of raw power. But a world without rules is a nonsense. And those rules are not just for others, for our enemies. They are universal. They are for us too, and our friends.
Which brings me back to Germany, which has engaged like no other country with the crimes of its past, and has made me who I am. Yet there hangs a burden of heavy responsibility, like the albatross hung around the neck of the ancient mariner, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s memorable poem. (1)
The Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 were appalling. They evoked the pogroms that inspired Rafael Lemkin to invent the word genocide.
I was deeply shocked that day, yet I also feared what would follow. I joined other British, Jewish lawyers – including a former President of the Supreme Court – in writing a column for the Financial Times.
We made three points.
One: Hamas’ actions on the territory of Israel were an egregious violation of basic norms of international law.
Two: like any state, Israel had a right to respond in self-defence.
And three: that right was not unlimited and must be exercised within the limits of international law.
I stand by these points, and regret that our fears came true.
International crimes were committed on the territory of Israel on 7 October, and then on the territory of Palestine, in Gaza and in the West Bank.
The label to put on those crimes is debated. Lemkin would likely have called both genocide, but his definition set a lower bar than the one later adopted in the 1948 Convention on Genocide. The International Criminal Court has charged leaders on both sides for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not – for now at least – genocide.
South Africa has brought a case to the International Court of Justice, a different court in The Hague. It alleges genocide in Gaza. Next month, that Court will give its judgment in the Gambia v. Myanmar case. Its interpretation and application of the 1948 Convention will indicate whether South Africa will succeed or fail.
Whatever the rulings, the debate about labels is, I fear, an unhelpful distraction. There is no hierarchy among the various international crimes. To kill as a war crime or a crime against humanity is not less grave than a genocide. These are all terrible crimes.
They demand accountability and must be called out, and those who do the calling – whatever label they use – should not be silenced or excluded or punished, merely for exercising a freedom of expression. Writers and journalists, songsters and poets, filmmakers and others must be able to tell their stories.
To silence the fact of the crimes is indecent. To silence those who seek to call out the crimes is indecent.
There is no hierarchy among the various international crimes. To kill as a war crime or a crime against humanity is not less grave than a genocide
Germany has called out and acted on many horrors, from the Yazidis to the Uighurs, from Syria to Iran, from Myanmar to Sudan and Ukraine.
Yet on Israel, Gaza and the West Bank the German silence has been loud. Relatedly, the restrictions on debate are troubling. This is all the more so after the ICJ’s clear advisory opinion of 2024, on the Palestinian right of self-determination. Britain, Canada, France and others have since recognised a Palestinian state. In recent days they have imposed sanctions. The British Foreign Secretary has characterised conduct in the occupied territories as ethnic cleansing.
Germany knows about ethnic cleaning. So why the silence?
Literature helps us to understand why speaking truth can be difficult. In The Ratline, I wrote of the son of a Nazi governor, who accepts his father’s involvement in mass murder but is unable to characterise him as criminal. In sharp contrast, the governor’s granddaughter has found the strength to speak the facts for what they are. That is courage.
I understand that a speaker’s identity and its past conduct are relevant. I am aware too that some German leaders have begun to speak more sharply in their criticism of Israel’s actions. That is right, even if so tentative and limited. It is not anti-semitic. It is not “anti-Israel”. It is truth.
And a true, non-racialised “reason of state” for Germany, eighty years after Nuremberg, must surely be to break silences about international crimes, wherever they occur and by whomsoever they are committed, even friends, especially friends. That includes crimes that may be perpetrated by a state established to protect individuals who suffered acts in the name of the German state. Decades on, these too are ›beyond comprehension‹.
Silence – and silence about crimes – is what I litigate and write about. The books are a form of literary advocacy against silence.
The silence of the family. Mine and that of others on the victim side, and on the perpetrator side.
The silence of communities, including political and religious institutions.
The silence of countries. Like that of Britain, for its colonial legacy, as described in my book The Last Colony, on Chagos and Mauritius, or on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Or Chile, or Rwanda, or Serbia, which recently allowed a convicted genocidaire to be buried with military honours.
Yet on Israel, Gaza and the West Bank the German silence has been loud. Relatedly, the restrictions on debate are troubling
This is what I know: silence is not the way. Not for a family. Not for a community. Not for a country.
Which is where law and literature come together, telling stories, opening minds, bringing truth to power, confronting prejudice and double standards, excavating matters that some wish to hide.
And so, in these difficult times, here in Germany and elsewhere, as the abyss beckons, let us not forget from whence we came, and the principles established to shine a light on horrors.
Let us draw hope, from the Lauterpachts, Lemkins and Haffners.
Let us know that silence shall hang like an albatross around our necks.
Let us hear the writers, poets and songsmiths who call things by their names, even if it brings discomfort: novelists like Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, on the genocide in Rwanda, or Adania Shibli, on a crime in the Negev; writers like Eva Menasse and Richard Flanagan, who confront our struggles with truth; and film-makers, like Luca Guadagnino, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor; and all who use the power of words, images and rules to protect the autonomy and rights of individuals and groups.
And so ….
Let us protect the writers and the jurists, so they may be free from threat, attack or sanction.
Let us not “allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping,” as George F. Kennan once warned, “and apply the rules to all, friends and enemies alike.”
And so, to take a refrain from my favourite Canadian poet:
Let us run no more, with the lawless crowds, whoever they may be.
Let us hold to account the killers in high places, even as they say their prayers aloud.
Let us ring the bells, that still can ring.
Let us not forget there is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. (2)
- ‘Instead of the cross, the Albatross / About my neck was hung.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834).
- Leonard Cohen, Anthem (1992)
👉 The text of the speech on the website of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
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